Smart Car Tipping Is The New Cow Tipping

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Like, it totally sucks.

OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, according to NBC Bay Area an outbreak of directed vandalism has left a handful of the city’s tiny Smart cars in precarious situations. The station reportedly found three of the vehicles flipped or on a side between Sunday night and Monday morning, noting that the cars “were either sitting on their headlights, rear bumpers high in the air, or vice versa.”

Presumably a pack - or multiple packs - of vandals is to blame. San Francisco Police Officer Gordon Shyy tells NBC that the car flippers are still at large.

Here’s how it goes down, according to NBC:

Witness Brandon Michael was out having a cigarette about 1 a.m. Monday when he spotted about six to eight individuals wearing hooded sweatshirts flip over the cars.

“They looked like they were up to no good,” he said. “And sure enough, they huddled around it and lifted it up.”

Perhaps most interesting, this isn’t a new phenomenon. As the NBC story notes, “In 2009, the Toronto Star wrote a piece, ‘Tipping smart cars the latest prank trend,’ comparing the act of tipping over the pint-size vehicles as the modern-day equivalent of tipping over cows.” The piece also references a Smart car-tipping Facebook page published by a user “who does not ‘practice, promote or condone Smart Car Tipping.’”

So it’s a thing. Or something.

Anyway, here in Seattle a police spokesperson offered merely a, “wow,” when informed of the trend.